40 Karin’s BYP Business Brief
By Karin Frick
[email protected]
Every month, Karin Frick of BYP profiles Thailand’s
most inspiring businesspeople and reveals their
secrets for success. If you’d like to meet Bangkok’s
business leaders and lots of dynamic people of all
nationalities, make sure to attend our Bangkok Young Professionals monthly networking
events, dinners or golf sessions. Bangkok Young
Professionals was founded by Karin Frick and Callum
Laing in August 2006. For more information please visit
www.mobyelite.com/byp
Name: Bernard Collin
Company: Safecoms Australia, UK and Thailand
Age: 55
BANGKOK’S MOST-WIDELY DISTRIBUTED MAGAZINE
41 1. Why did you first come to
Thailand?
4. What has been your most
frustrating?
After launching Safecoms in Sydney
Australia in 1999, we opened a branch
in the UK in 2002. Our customers were
mainly enterprise businesses that had
branches in Asia. It became obvious
that we needed an office to supply quality services locally, hence the move to
Thailand in 2004.
Dealing with large Thai corporations.
Decisions cannot be made in a rational
way, and long-term strategy is something to be avoided at any cost. This is
why we only target multinational cus-
It turns out however that the needs of
the branch offices are dramatically different from the head offices. In Australia
and the UK we exclusively do consulting and auditing, but in here in Thailand
we actually develop and sell tailored
solutions for smaller size companies.
2. What is your elevator pitch for
your company?
We make security and management
control affordable for small and medium
sized offices. We design solutions that
they would normally find in large enterprises, like full backup, internet traffic
monitoring, SPAM and virus control,
adapted to a size and price that they
can afford without the hassle of hiring
and maintaining an army of IT staff. We
are their total IT solution and expertise
providers.
We’re able to totally outsource all of
their IT problems and give them the level of service their headquarters would
expect back home. That is very hard to
find here in Thailand.
3. What has been your proudest
moment with your business?
We designed the impossible for a customer who had been given extremely
expensive quotations to do a multi-site
project with connection and monitoring
of seven branches in Thailand. We had
to organize it all within a very reasonable budget with zero IT staff within
the company, and we delivered a level
of management control that brought a
smile to the owner’s face when he saw
it all operating. The company is Bartercard, and you can see the testimonial
on our website: www.safecoms.com/
about_movie_graham.html.
tomers.
5. Who has inspired you the most in
business and why?
Apple Inc.
I was lucky enough to work with Apple
from 1978 to 1983, the golden age
when Steve Jobs was 28 and easily
approachable. Steve and I were born
at the same time but in a different time
zone, so different calendar day. I spent
a lot of time in California with all the
guys at Apple who made the computer
world what it is today. That was an awesome experience.
6. Favorite business book?
Too many to mention really, but what
has helped me the most in my business
life is NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), a very barbarian name for a way
of life that gets you back to reality on
a day-to-day basis, and has helped me
tremendously in communication and
management.
7. What does a typical day look like
for you?
My morning starts with email as soon
as I get out of bed and before breakfast.
Then I plan the day and get important
things done before the rush starts. Later on, short meetings take place in the
morning to make sure we’re all in sync
and then we get to do our job. Lunch is
usually with colleagues and occasionally with customers.
At the end of the day, we have a brief
review to make sure we’re still all working towards the same goal.
Evenings are usually dedicated to
study. I remain an engineer at heart and
have developed a passion for a new
Bangkok Young Professionals (BYP) is open to everyone! Don’t hesitate come to our
events. You ‘ll meet like-minded individuals, enjoy great food in new and exciting venues
and have fun exchanging business cards. Find out more about our upcoming events on
our website www.mobyelite.com/byp .
programming language. I love music
and painting. Sports is the big missing
bit here and I am gradually bringing it
back into the picture (early morning is
my favorite time). Weekends are for my
wife and kids.
8. What advice would you give to
someone looking to start their own
business?
Only do it out of passion, not for any
other reason. Life is really tough when
you have your own business and the
only way you can survive is if you really
love what you do.
Watch out every time you make a big
decision -- it takes a lot of effort to build
a business, and a single wrong decision
can have catastrophic consequences.
Be prepared to fail and start again, and
treat each mistake as a lesson that you
will benefit from every single time. Giving up is not an option once you start.
9. Where will your business be five
years from now?
We intend to bring this venture to IPO
in about this timeframe, so we have a
clear plan of the steps we have to accomplish and milestones ahead of us.
We are on target and enjoying it.
10.Why should someone contact
your business over your competitors
and how should they get in touch?
Because we care. We are friendly, easy
to do business with, and are extremely
knowledgeable in our area of expertise.
We are committed to our customers,
and we deliver quality standards that
you can’t find in any IT company today
in Thailand.
We also have exclusive solutions that
our customers cannot purchase anywhere else, as we design most of what
we sell and make sure it matches our
customers’ business needs.
While
we’re not the cheapest, we guarantee
that our customers will save money with
us. We are committed to helping them
reach their own business objectives.
They focus on their business expertise,
while we focus on ours. It is a great
combination.
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